No need to get snarky now! ;-) I didn't offer "1+1=2 ..." as an example of great wit (the joke's not my invention, btw), but as an example of something that is funny but does not make fun of someone. I like some of your humorous posts.
At around 1/11/06 11:30 am, Marvin Gandall wrote:
>> Travis writes:
>>>
>>> But this speaks to why the only format is posssible is electronic with a
>>> more open source structure. This keeps resource commitments way down in
>>> the zone of practicable.
>> ========================
>> No doubt. But isn't it a cacophony out there, even on the left? How do you
>> make yourself heard above the din? Isn't it still more practicable to
>> contribute as individuals to the already established online left and, where
>> possible, mainstream publications?
>
Yes, there is a a lot of content on the Internet, even on the left, but does it create a cacophony? My guess is probably not... take for example my semi-serious blog which I use as a way to bookmark things that I find interesting (or at times to write HOWTO notes that others might find useful when they search Google for some problem or other). I have maybe 10 or 20 dedicated readers (I have no idea why these poor souls have stuck with me), but technorati says I am already ranked 400,000 or some such among a million or so blogs. The point being that nobody reads this abundance of content. Blogs like mine are fortunately ignored thanks to the ranking mechanisms of Google and friends and plain old word-of-mouth propagation.
Contributing to established sites is a good idea except:
a) They do not seem to meet our criteria whatever they are, or we would
be reading, enjoying and contributing to them already.
b) They tend to be either irrelevant beyond a very small group of
faithful, or cliquish and driven by the policies and motives that are
not much differentiable from the mainstream (ad revenue, the goals of
the founders, very narrow focus, etc).
It may be better to cross-link or collaborate with such groups. The premise here is that there is enough headcount and talent within "our" left to make this possible. We get heard above the din based on that and the hope that we are not as dull as others, and also by exploiting the range of skills within our group. You have funny guys, polemical cranks (and I say that lovingly! please do not flame me!), people with a lot of great analytical skills and depth of knowledge, web designers, computing dudes, etc, etc.
In fact, I can argue that it is the cacophony of blogs that necessitates a collaborative site. I remember reading recently that though there are a lot of readers of blogs, less than 50% of them use RSS feed readers to do so... in fact most of them do not even know what such readers are! What this tells me is that readers are not aggregating their news of interest (like I do with a feed reader) so that they can create a virtual single view of all their items of interest. Instead, they use some older method like bookmarks or just entering the URL to visit each site, scrolling across pages of entries. At some point the fatigue arising from this method restricts the number of sites they visit.
Huffington Post is one attempt at doing something similar to what we are talking about here. They try to cover a wide range of issues, have a bunch of writers, including big name celebrities, and try to be funny too. They are ranked on technorati (FWIW) as one of the top 5 or 10 blogs.
--ravi